A very detailed post at the Building Windows 8 blog about the graphics subsystem in Windows 8 - very interesting. One part stood out to me, though: "The Metro style design language is typographically rich and a number of Metro style experiences are focused on providing an excellent reading experience. DirectWrite enables great typographic quality, super-fast processing of font data for rendering, and provides industry-leading global text support. We've continued to improve text performance in Windows 8 by optimizing our default text rendering in Metro style apps to deliver better performance and efficiency, while maintaining typographic quality and global text support." All this still doesn't explain why text rendering on Metro (so not the classic desktop) had to be made as horrible as it is. Please, for the love of god, give us the option of turning ClearType's subpixel RGB optimisation back on for Metro applications. Fonts look horrible without it, which is kind of ironic given how font-heavy Metro is.

I'm not sure why rotating the display is an unsurmountable problem. Worst case scenario, you'd just turn it off when its rotated 90 degrees and the text goes from Great to good. Isn't that better than having it always just good most of the time? It will never be worse than simply having it off all the time, and not any more jarring than switching between a desktop with clear type and back to metro without.

I think the real reason why its not there is that they don't have time to figure out what to do with it, so they just left it out completely. Watch for it to come back in a service pack, accompanied with ads telling us how they listened to customer feedback to make windows 8 even better.

I'm not sure why rotating the display is an unsurmountable problem. Worst case scenario, you'd just turn it off when its rotated 90 degrees and the text goes from Great to good. Isn't that better than having it always just good most of the time?

1) Consistency of the text goes completely out of the window. I imagine that is fairly jarring to the user.

2) The font cache will have to be recreated for ClearType glyphs and non ClearType glyphs. Then the gui will also have to be redrawn with the new glyphs, etc.